You must get recognised a lot, I suggest to Loris Loizides. He hesitates, as if looking for a modest way to put it. “Well, OK,” he concedes, unable to find one; “There isn’t really anyone who doesn’t know you anymore. I mean, if you acted in Aigia Fuxia – even as an extra – the whole of Cyprus saw you”. Loris was much more than an extra on the hit TV comedy, having co-written Aigia and played a lead role. Even more importantly, he’s followed up with Patates Antinachtes, the ground-breaking satire that’s far and away the most popular programme on CyBC and something of a cultural milestone, watched by people who don’t normally watch local TV. He co-writes that one as well (with Akis Orphanides) and plays a variety of comic characters, notably tic-ridden sports commentator ‘Fasos Constantinou’.
“This doesn’t really change things, though,” he adds, speaking of his newfound fame. “It might even make them more difficult – because people expect big things from you now”. Even on the street, when his fans recognise him, “they expect you to tell a joke, something to make them laugh. Maybe something to make their kid laugh.”
Does he do it? Does he make people’s children laugh?
“No…”
So does he just turn his back on them?
“No, I don’t turn my back. I’ll talk to people, I’ll talk to the kid, what have you. But I can’t open up, or tell a joke or whatever.” He thinks about it: “I might say something. But it definitely won’t be what they’re expecting.”
Then again, they might expect it more if they spent some time talking to the real-life person, instead of his TV incarnation. We speak in the foyer of the Pantheon Theatre in Nicosia – where he’s starring in Kotziakaro Teza, a local version of the ‘interactive’ comedy whodunit Shear Madness – but he’s not remotely theatrical, at least in the flamboyant showbiz way. He talks quietly and easily, with a Cypriot accent he makes no effort to disguise (speaking ‘good’ Greek is often an obsession with local actors). His default facial expression is a kind of wary politeness, with a penetrating stare; he doesn’t seem to blink very often. He’s not laugh-a-minute, nor does he try to be.
Maybe it’s because he doesn’t sleep much – three to four hours on a typical weeknight, maybe six to seven on the weekend. As well as the play (which he’s also directing) there’s Patates, which he shoots four days a week and of course has to write the day before. Loris mostly writes the non-political bits – but it’s his hours which are unusual, because he does his writing when the rest of the world is asleep (he’s not a trained writer, he points out: “I didn’t study scriptwriting, nor did I ever plan to write TV shows”). After the performance at the Pantheon, i.e. around midnight, he’ll go home, sleep for a few hours – then wake up at 4am, go on the internet and read the day’s news, using that as inspiration to write a half-dozen scenes for the next day’s show. It sounds exhausting, especially since he doesn’t nap during the day – but he says it’s inevitable, given all his projects, and indeed it was even worse when he had to write episodes of Aigia Fuxia in addition to Patates. “I’m used to it. Even though I’m starting to get certain health issues now – like a little warning bell saying, you know, ‘relax’.” He shrugs: “I relax in the summer mostly, a couple of months in a row.”
Then again, maybe it’s not lack of sleep that makes Loris come across as non-flamboyant. Maybe that’s just the way he is. Asked for his own favourite funnymen, he comes up with Peter Sellers because he was “restrained” in his comedy: “He didn’t pull faces. Everything came out very simply and nicely”. Loris also cites Sotiris Moustakas for his “pauses”, the way the famous Cypriot-born actor used to pause onstage and get a bigger laugh the more he paused (they were pregnant pauses, he points out; they made you see what his character was thinking). I suspect he isn’t overly fond of the manic style in local TV comedy – nor does he seem too fond of the manic aspects of Cyprus society. “Cypriots got carried away at some point,” he asserts, speaking (implicitly) of the Stock Exchange and property bubbles that preceded the current recession. Now, “they’re becoming more restrained. It keeps them home more, with family, with friends. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing necessarily.”
His own family background was entirely unexceptional, born in Limassol 35 years ago to a thoroughly non-showbiz family. His dad (now retired) was a trained accountant who “did various jobs”; his mum is in sales, “but nothing really wow,” he adds vaguely. Just an ordinary middle-class family “which had absolutely nothing to do with the subject I – paradoxically – wanted to study.”
Here’s the most amazing thing about Loris Loizides: he grew up barely even knowing what an actor was – yet always wanted to be one. “The first play I ever watched, apart from children’s theatre, was when I was in the Army,” he points out. This is not the way it’s supposed to work with actors. “Most of them became actors because they watched a film [that impressed them],” he admits, “or they had a role model, or they’re related to so-and-so who got them in the business, or they wanted to be an actor because their dad was one, or they happened to go onstage when they were kids and liked it”. None of this applies to Loris. He didn’t go onstage as a child. He had no actors in the family. He didn’t watch a film that blew his mind. He wasn’t even the kind of boy who liked to entertain his friends with jokes and stories, the kind of extrovert, hyperactive kid you might tag as a future thespian.
“As a person, I am – and was – shy,” he insists. “I mean, I don’t socialise easily. If I’m talking to a guy I don’t know, I won’t try and be funny. I might be sitting with a group of people I don’t know and not say a word for three hours – just listen. OK, with my friends I crack jokes and so on – but I’m never the one who’ll do the most ‘wow’ things. I’m always a little on the serious side. Of course the moment when I go onstage, or when they say ‘3, 2, 1, action’, something else happens. Which I think is magical, and I can’t really explain it.”
He may be shy, and the transformation may be magical – yet he always knew, that’s the strange thing. He always knew this was what he wanted. “As long as I can remember, when people asked ‘What are you going to be when you grow up, Loris?’ I’d say ‘An actor’. I can’t explain why”. He auditioned for drama school in Greece, a school so prestigious that 56 aspiring actors went in and only seven graduated. He had trouble with the Cypriot accent, and some of his snobbier fellow students: “The attitude you got [was] ‘oh, here comes the little peasant boy’,” he recalls with a touch of grim satisfaction.
Yet he never wavered. Even at the auditions, with “everyone reading books and doing breathing exercises” to prepare for going onstage, “I just sat there and knew inside myself that I’ll go onstage, I’ll say my piece, I’ll get in. That I was there on a mission which had to happen. I never thought, you know, ‘what am I going to do if I don’t pass?’ It never even crossed my mind. And when I got into the school and people started leaving one by one, it never crossed my mind that I might be one of those who had to leave”. He shrugs: “Always in my life, it’s like there was something guiding me. I knew I was going to do it, finish, come back, work, and do good things.”
Was it just self-confidence?
“It might be self-confidence, it might be some invisible force. Maybe it’s what people mean by God,” he replies. “I don’t know,” he adds, and gestures with his hand, putting it to his forehead and extending it forwards: “It wa
s like a straight line, that’s still going on.”
In the future (he hopes) the line might lead to the Holy Grail, a feature-length comedy that’ll play cinemas (not just TV) in Europe, not just Cyprus. At the moment, the line extends to his own theatre company, Peirasmos Productions – they aim to stage one play a year, Kotziakaro Teza being the second – and of course Patates on TV. The satirical show is a big hit – though it’s also true that it doesn’t really challenge its audience, reflecting back to them what they want to see and feel comfortable with: politics, football, digs at lazy civil servants. Nothing about gay rights, for instance; very little about racism, especially against Turks or Turkish Cypriots. For a man with so much self-belief, it seems odd that Loris doesn’t take more risks. Even the plays his company stages are adapted from already-existing hits; “I like to find plays which I think are suitable for Cypriots,” as he puts it.
That’s where being non-showbiz makes a difference, perhaps. Deep down, I suspect, Loris doesn’t see himself as part of a thespian elite, an exalted class of actors, possessed of gifts denied to mere mortals. He’s more likely to see himself as an ordinary guy who – through perseverance, lack of sleep and against the odds – made it in a world he never even glimpsed as a child. Patates is “the voice of the people,” he tells me; it’s “what the ordinary Cypriot knows, what he sees, when he understands that something’s wrong but can’t quite express it, so you come and clear it up for him”. The point is for viewers to feel vindicated, even empowered: “We don’t express our own opinion. We express the opinion of the masses.”
Loris himself isn’t political. He doesn’t use satire to stroke his own ego, like Lakis Lazopoulos in Greece. He doesn’t create the news, merely uses what’s already there. The line is clear, he says: “You don’t go in the other person’s home”. They’ll exaggerate what the Archbishop says for comic effect, but “we won’t investigate, or go in his office and look around and get it out there first. That’s not satire”.
In the end, the non-flamboyant style may be more than just an act. You suspect he feels happier at a football match than a glittering after-party. He likes to observe people, says Loris Loizides, “just ordinary people. Even you, right now, or the canteen guy over there. Or a butcher, or a kiosk owner”. What delights him most about Kotziakaro Teza (apart from the fact that it’s been playing to full houses for the past three months) is its interactive quality: it’s a whodunit where the audience solves the mystery, meaning he has to field questions from the audience every night – a great gig for an actor who likes to observe others. There’s something slightly hollow in Loris, as you might expect in someone who’s never wanted to be anything more than an actor – a vessel, a messenger. He’s a man without a subject, who’s found his subject in people.
‘Don’t you think you should start getting ready?’ I ask, with a touch of concern. It’s 8.05, and the play starts at 8.30. He’s still in the foyer in his street clothes. People are starting to trickle in; he basks in their presence. In a couple of minutes he’ll get up, go to his dressing room, get changed, put on makeup – then go onstage, and turn from Loris Loizides into someone else without a second thought. “I was born this way.”
